Oleg Sentsov. CC BY-SA 4.0 Antonymon / Wikipedia. Some rights reserved.Oleg Sentsov, a Ukrainian film director from Simferopol and a political prisoner of the Kremlin, is on Day 16 of a hunger strike. Sentsov selected the start date (14 May) to make sure that he will have been striking for a full month by the start of the Football World Cup, which begins in Russia on 14 June. The aim of Sentsov’s protest is the release of 64 Ukrainian citizens who are currently held in the Russian Federation on political grounds.
In summer 2014, Sentsov, an AutoMaidan activist from Crimea, was accused of terrorism offences — he reportedly planned to set a local United Russia office on fire and blow up a local Lenin monument. The investigation and trial was based on testimony received under torture and later retracted. No evidence of any terrorist group existing in Crimea was ever found, and the only thing that “proved” Sentsov’s membership of Ukrainian far-right group Right Sector, a name used by Kremlin propaganda to whip up fear of a “Nazi junta” in Kyiv, was a CD containing the Soviet documentary “Ordinary Fascism”.
During his trial in 2015, Sentsov refused to recognise that Russian citizenship had been imposed on him, claiming that he wasn’t a serf to be sold with the land. Without a shred of evidence, he was sentenced to 20 years in prison, and is currently being held in a prison colony in the Far North Of Russia. The fact that Sentsov is both a film director and a incredibly brave individual has guaranteed him media support and international public opinion — which hasn’t, it should be said, so far led to his release. But he isn’t on hunger strike for himself: he is striking for all Ukrainian political prisoners currently held in the Russian Federation.
